As I looked through our pictures
it occurred to me that it would be nice to offer a close up of the various faces
of the animals we saw. I hope this jumble of pictures are as attractive to
you as they were to Jackie and me. There's no particular order or
sequence. We simply went through the pictures and grabbed the ones we
liked.

HOWEVER, prior to going on this
trip I had read the passage below in our Tanzania Guide book. Consequently
I was curious as to just what we would find as we looked for wild
animals. The longer we were on safari, the more I agreed with the
author - whether Tanzania or Kenya, or even Ngorongoro, although it was the only
place that could be described as small and confined, but about these stops not
being a "bloody zoo." I firmly believe these animals,
while easily called "habituated", were far, very far from being
"tame". These were wild animals, in their native
environment, paying little or no attention to we humans - as long as we stayed
in the van. The moment we were to step out, their normal environment would
be challenged, and possibly we would see exactly how tame they actually
were. Recall, we were never allowed to jump out of the vehicle, we were
always escorted to our cabins in the evening, warned to never walk about at
night, and we were even protected by rifle carrying escorts while walking in the
bush.

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NOT
A BLOODY ZOO

A
regular criticism of the Ngorongoro Crater, one that in my opinion is
desperately misguided, is that it is “'like a zoo”. .Aside from being
yawningly unoriginal - I must hear this phrase two dozen times in the course of
researching any given edition of this book - this allegation is-as facile as it
is nonsensical. The wildlife in the crater is not caged, nor is it artificially
fed, surely the defining qualities of a zoo, but is instead free to come and go
as it pleases. Yes, the crater's animals are generally very relaxed around
vehicles, but that doesn't make them tame, merely habituated - no different,
really to the mountain gorillas of Rwanda or the chimps at Mahale.

The
point that many visitors to Ngorongoro miss is that, for all the elitism
attached to Africa's more remote game reserves, it is only in places where the
wildlife is almost totally habituated that casual visitors can watch the animals
behave much as they would were no human observers present. And, trust me; this
is an infinitely more satisfying experience than traveling through a reserve
where the wildlife is so skittish that most sightings amount to little more than
a rump disappearing into the bush.

I suspect that the notion of Ngorongoro as a glorified zoo stems from something
else entirely. This is the high volume of tourist traffic, which admittedly robs
the crater floor of some of its atmosphere, and has some potential to cause
environmental degradation, but is of questionable impact on the animals.

On
the contrary, the wildlife of Ngorongoro is apparently far less affected by the
presence of vehicles than, say, the elephants and giraffes in the Selous, which
regularly display clear signs of distress at the approach of a vehicle. The
problem, basically, is that the high volume of other tourists in the relatively
small and open confines of the crater jars against our sense of aesthetics -
especially when game spotting entails looking for a group of vehicles clustered
together in the distance rather than looking for an actual animal!

Personally,
I feel that the scenery and abundance of animals more than makes up for the mild
congestion, but if crowds put you off, then there are other places to visit in
Tanzania. Instead of adding to the tourist traffic, then moaning about it, why
not give the crater a miss? Or, better still, make the effort to be in the
crater first thing in the morning when, for a brief hour or two before the
post-breakfast crowds descend, it really does live up to every expectation of
untrammeled beauty.

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So finally, no words, just images.

Enjoy!

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Correct! Some of those shots were less than
perfect. As we went along, some of these animals simply would not cooperate;
they just would not pose. Pam and I started calling the following pictures
"Butt Shots". We got more of them than we would
like, butt we'd like to share some of them.

Well, there's a few that are betwixt and
between - half face and half butt.